Breaking Tradition | Kendra Whitfield
Will you haunt me if I don't make pineapple whip this year?
If I break the Christmas chain?
Disconnecting from the matriarchs
who made it every year through
two World Wars, the Great Depression,
every historical and family calamity since 1900?
You always said it wasn’t Christmas without it and I believed you.
You could connect the stars with your stories,
carving constellations of wonder into my impressionable mind.
It’s been eight years since I served you
your last dish of the whipped-cream and gelatin confection
whose recipe was cribbed from an advertisement
for the new miracle product that was canned fruit.
Eight years since I brought a crystal bowlful
to your hospital room, fed you
spoonful after spoonful until the nurses said,
No more!
Every Christmas since, I’ve made it like you taught me:
draining the pineapple overnight,
putting the mixing bowl and beaters outside to chill,
because cream whips up lighter, fluffier, stiffer
when everything is icy cold.
I’ve wrestled with Saran wrap,
even decorated the top with plastic holly leaves,
just like you used to do.
Traditions are hollow now,
and overflowing with tears.
You were married to yours,
but your home never broke.
That’s a lie.
Keeping them kept you afloat
when life’s disappointments threatened to drown you.
All they do now is drag me down:
The weight of your expectations clings
to me like the sodden skirts of drowning witches..
No more!
I’m tired of fighting this current,
All I want to do is float.
Part of me is afraid you’ll haunt me,
Most of me is afraid
You won’t.
